Corruption, Covenant, Cubits

Well, this morning, as you perhaps see in the bulletin, the title, I have to already give a caveat that if I hadn't already printed the bulletins, that certainly would not be the title this morning. Corruption, Covenant, and Qubits, because I don't think we're going to make it to Covenant and Qubits this morning, and corruption's kind of a lousy title.

The Corruption of Creation and the Promise of Covenant

So there's a lot going on in chapter six, and we need to take time to address it. And though we have been trying to pursue the forest more than the trees, there are some trees that are so tall and so complex that they capture our attention, and that happens to be the case this morning.

Last week, we closed out the book of Adam, which goes, remember, all the way to chapter.

Six, verse eight.

And so the book of Adam runs from chapter five, verse one, to chapter six, verse eight, and then we begin with the book of Noah, beginning in chapter six, verse nine.

This is the genealogy of Noah.

Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God, and Noah begot three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And so that was what we borrowed out of chapter six this morning. Of course, to borrow that, we skipped over the beginning of chapter six, and we want to look at chapter six as a whole between this week and next week.

What we'll see, especially this morning, is a major emphasis on the corruption of creation. The corruption of creation through human sin, and God's response of judgment. And as we saw last week, God reveals his salvation through judgment.

And I think we'll look at that, perhaps. I don't think we'll make it there this morning. We'll try, but perhaps we'll see that next week. God's salvation through judgment, and specifically, how it comes by way of covenant.

This is a rehearsal of what we've seen in Genesis chapter two, and Genesis chapter three,.

As well.

That God acts by way of covenant. When he arranges a way of interacting with man, of saving man, he does so by way of covenant. And we'll see that next week. God's covenant secures Noah on the basis of his salvation, and from it, we'll see the effects of God's grace in Noah's life.

Noah believes the Lord. Noah obeys the Lord, down to the nitty gritty details, down to the cubit by cubit commandments. And so we read at the very end of chapter six, thus Noah did. Now, first things first, we have to navigate the first four verses.

The Sons of God, the Daughters of Men, and the Nephilim

We have to navigate the Nephilim, the giants. Genesis six, from the beginning, it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful.

And they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh. Yet his day shall be one hundred and twenty years. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.

Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Notice the language here in verse two. The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, and they took. Does that sound familiar?

Seeing, seeing something pleasing to the eye and taking. It brings us back to Eve and her temptation in chapter three.

And by the way, the Hebrew verb there for take, l 'chach,.

That's normally an idiom for marriage, to take a wife unto yourself. And we find that throughout the Old Testament, certainly throughout Genesis. But that's not always the only way this verb is used. And so here, the translator assumes that the sons of God are taking wives.

Wives is added here. The verb is simply, they took for themselves any they chose.

That's very straightforward.

And so we have to kind of move beyond the assumption of the translators here, because it's not explicit in the text. For example, the same verb, same exact verb is used in the tragic rape of Dinah. In Genesis 34, when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.

This was not a marriage. This was a violent seizure. And so perhaps here in Genesis 6, we don't have wedding ceremonies, but rather a violent taking, a violent seizing. So notice we have two groups. We have the sons of God on the one hand, and the daughters of men on the other.

These two groups are not further explained for us. We don't have a parenthesis or a little footnote telling us, here's what's going on with these two groups. All we can tell is that these two groups are contrasted from each other.

And the result is given in verse 4. There were giants. This is where we get the word nephilim. That could come from the verb nephal, which means to fall. It could be, in other words, fallen ones. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward.

Perhaps meaning after the flood. When the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. What in the pre-flood world is going on here?

This is one of those passages where it's been debated ever since it was written. And really, everything boils down, there's always variations, but everything really boils down to three main views. The oldest view, going back to the ancient Jewish interpreters, and the earliest of Christian traditions, holds that the sons of God are angels.

More specifically, fallen angels. And that these angels, in their fallen rebellion against God, either took some sort of corporeal form, bodily, fleshly form, or, in some variations, inhabited human beings, sort of a demonic possession.

Either way, this view holds that this is the effect, as they cohabited with the daughters of men, that they bore giants, nephilim, mighty ones, rulers.

That's the first view, the oldest view.

Second view, another view, goes back to the early church,.

Though a little bit later,.

And it's been maintained, really, throughout Christian history. Perhaps this is the dominant view. We find it in Luther, Calvin, many contemporary Reformed thinkers, is that the sons of God are the Sethite.

They're the Sethite line, the sons of God, the sons of the elect line, the godly line. Those, in other words, as we saw in chapter 4, who called upon the name of the Lord at the very end of His genealogy.

And so, in this view, the issue is there's a mixing of marriage going on here. The Sethites, the sons of God, are marrying themselves to the Cainite daughters of men.

That's the view.

And so there's this corruption that takes place,.

And it leads to depravity.

Third view, I'll unpack these as we move forward. A third view, a more recent view, though you find some older variations of it, would see simply the sons of God as rulers, basically kings from the Cainite line.

And the claim, in this view,.

Is that in ancient Near Eastern literature,.

We have pagan rulers who refer to themselves as gods, or they claim to be divine offspring. And so the thought is that these were the mighty men, kind of men like Lamech, who took for themselves any woman they chose.

They built themselves harems. And these were the mighty men. They were like giants. A variation on that in the Greek is they were violent men. Violent men. They built empires. Something like Nimrod on the way toward Babel.

So this is another view. In other words, Cainite rulers. Well, these verses have been debated for millennia. And we're not going to solve the debate here in 45 minutes this morning. We're not even going to break new ground.

The complexity of this passage should, first of all, humble us. And then we should respect it. We should respect that in Scripture, as Peter reminds us, there are some things that are hard to understand.

And this is one of them. This is one of those passages where there are things that are hard to understand. And so we humbly confess that here we have some mystery and not all is plain. Not all is alike, clear to us.

At the same time, we can weigh these different views against one another and try to get a sense if there's any other parallels in Scripture that might help us favor one over the others. So I'm offering this humbly.

You'll see I'm leaning in a certain direction. But I admit every view has its strengths. Every view has its question marks. So this is not the only way. You might come up and say, yes, but don't you see this?

Don't you see this? And I'll amen you. Everything I've looked over the past few weeks I find convincing. Every time I'm like, yes, that view nails it.

Let's go to this view.

Okay, they got it right.

Let's go to this view.

All right, they're right too. What's going on? Starting with the last view, the most recent view, the Cainite king's view. This to me seems to be the easiest one to dismiss. In fact, it's rarely held by anyone in the past, and it's rarely held by anyone in the present.

It's certainly true that ancient Near Eastern rulers claimed to be divine offspring, but they are never, absolutely never referred to as sons of God. There's no inscription. There's no literary manuscript that we have that ever refers to an ancient Near Eastern ruler as sons of God or sons of a God.

It simply does not exist. For this title to be used without qualification here then does not support the claim. If this was a title that could be understood by the readers of Genesis, you would expect that it would be commonplace enough for us to find.

We have plenty of literature inscriptions from that time period. We simply just don't have ancient rulers referred to in this way as this group. Secondly, this view would not explain why Nephilim or giants are descending from them, unless you only take Nephilim to be not a literal physical description, but rather something figurative of their might or their prowess or their violence, which certainly is something true, but I tend to think that's true because they were physically tall, because they were giants.

That's why they were violent and mighty. That's why they could rule and dominate. What this view has going for it is the sense of giant or mighty one being about domination. That's a theme we've seen up to this point.

The whole emphasis in the Cainite line is they're building cities. They're building empires. Lamech is a violent man. And so that's going to continue to apex all the way to Babel. And so perhaps we have this parallel from 1 Chronicles 1.

We begin with the genealogy. Adam, Seth, Enosh, Canaan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth. Down the line of Ham, in 1 Chronicles 1, we read, Cush begot Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth.

Now, Nimrod is very significant in the establishment of Babel, which in Genesis is sort of the beginning of this great theme of the city of man as opposed to the city of God. And notice this verb. It's translated here as an aggressive.

He began to be a mighty one. Notice that he's not a mighty one. He began to be a mighty one. In other words, he began to dominate. He began to accumulate. He began to exercise power and build for himself stature.

He became this. It's not that he was a giant in the sense. He became this. That might be significant to show us that the Nephilim, it's more about their ability to reign and to dominate. That's the strength of this view.

But I don't think it squares with all of the details. So, for instance, the Nephilim that we find in Numbers 13,.

They're the giants in the land.

Is that what Moses means when he says both before and after these were the giants? It seems to be a physical description. What's the relationship between the Nephilim and the Anakim? We have sons of the giant one.

Is that just a ruler? There's many other rulers that are not referred to in that way at that time. So there's questions that I don't think this view can answer. Let's move on to the next view, the second view, this line of Seth view, the view that the problem is mixed marriage between the Sethites and the Canines.

This has, as I've mentioned, become the most dominant view, and it has a lot of strengths going for it. The biggest strength to my mind is it keeps the narrative flow. We've been emphasizing all along the significance of the Sethite line through which God is going to bring about redemption, culminating in Jesus Christ, versus the Canine line.

The sons of God in this view were chosen men, set apart by their lineage. And no wonder we find Israel doing the very same stumbling. They stumble in that they don't keep to a holy society, but they mix into pagan and worldly marriages, and so defile themselves and defile the land.

So perhaps here the sons of God are bringing about their own ruin, and that's what's being emphasized. By the late 3rd century, about 1700 years ago, Christian interpreters took this view for granted.

It would have been very rare to find anything but this view. Interestingly, the reason this became so popular, from what I've read, is because there was a lot of controversy about how to understand Christ.

What's the nature of Christ? How is he fully man and fully God? And these Christological controversies led them to be very careful about talking about angels taking on human form or taking on flesh, because there were some heretical views that claimed Christ was simply the chief angel, or Christ was sort of an appearance in the flesh similar to angels.

And so that's why they distanced this view. Augustine, for example, one of the greatest of church fathers, says, there is therefore no doubt that there were many giants before the deluge. So he's saying, he says in the same context, don't we know of that giant woman in Rome?

He's just saying, oh, there's always been giants. That doesn't seem to be what Moses is trying to emphasize.

But listen to him.

There is therefore no doubt that there were many giants before the deluge, and that these were citizens of the earthly society of men, and that the sons of God, who were, according to the flesh, the sons of Seth, sank into this community, and they forsook righteousness.

So this is how Augustine is taking it.

And it pleased the Creator to produce them, so that it could be demonstrated that neither beauty nor size nor strength are of importance to a wise man, because his blessedness lies in spiritual and immortal blessings that are far better and far more enduring, you see?

The whole point of the offspring is, you can have the beauty, you can have a harem, you can have the power, you can be a dominant ruler, you can have physical strength and height, but that's not going to matter.

That's not going to escape God's judgment.

That's Augustine's point.

Luther, similarly, the sons of God are those male descendants who have the promise of the gospel from Genesis 3 .15.

Calvin explains,.

Moses does not distinguish the sons of God from the daughters of men because they were dissimilar or of different origin, but because they were sons of God by adoption, whom he set apart for himself. It was therefore ingratitude in the line of Seth to mingle with the children of Cain.

It was an intolerable profanation to pervert and confound the order appointed by God.

So there it is.

Luther, Calvin, Augustine, the giants of church history, take the giants to just happen to be a phenomenon, but it's simply human lines, the line of Seth and the line of Cain intermarrying and mixing.

And Calvin says this perverts the order appointed by God. Well, the problem with that is that God never appoints such an order. He doesn't restrict marriage to the Sethites and the Cainites as far as we know.

We never read that at this stage in human history, there's a forbidding of intermarriage. In fact, we assume there was much intermarriage among the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Further, why would the sons of God be contrasted to the daughters of men?

Notice that.

The sons of God, the daughters of men. Do you see that contrast? Was it only mixed marriage one way? Why not say sons of God and daughters of Cain if that was the whole point you were trying to make? Why make the contrast between divine and human in other words?

And how does intermarriage between two human lines produce Nephilim, giants, if we understand them to be something more than just violent men? The phrase sons of God, to further make this a problematic view, the phrase sons of God always, always, always refers to angels in the Old Testament.

In fact, if sons of God here means sons of Seth, it would be the only place in the entire Old Testament where sons of God refers to something non-angelic. Sons of God always refers to angels in the Old Testament.

And we're not given an explanation to view this any differently. Further, and this brings us really to our last view, the fallen angels view, which you can tell, perhaps by now, this is the view I'm leaning toward.

This view assumes what the earliest Jewish readers, the earliest Jewish interpreters assumed. The sons of God are the sons of God. They are the angels. And their behavior is depraved, such that they are fallen.

Perhaps that's why their offspring are called the fallen ones, the Nephilim. Again, the phrase sons of God is set in deliberate contrast to the daughters of men, as though they were two different kinds.

Now, the problem is, obviously, this view requires a very strange thought that somehow angels, spiritual immortal beings, could physically copulate and reproduce with human women who are not according to their kind.

That's a problem.

We don't understand how that works. And for some, because we cannot understand how that works, it's far too fantastical. Calvin. This is not, you know, David Hume here. This is John Calvin writing centuries before the Enlightenment.

Calvin says,.

That ancient figment concerning intercourse of angels with women, it's abundantly refuted by its own absurdity. It's surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross.

So he just says, this is absurd.

This is ridiculous to consider.

Well, it may seem absurd to our concepts, to our standards, but that is no argument against it. We're speaking of the intersection between earthly norms and supernatural realities. And then we have to filter out the fact that we're living in a post-Enlightenment materialistic atmosphere where we automatically disdain things that smack of the supernatural.

We have a disdain for things that seem mystical or spiritually mysterious. I was reminded of this. Recently, last year, I had to do an assignment where, as a sort of capstone for my MDiv, I had to make a personal confession of faith.

And I had to have all the major categories of Christianity and just kind of give my views in scriptural defense for that. Well, I'm very thankful that I'm a confessional Christian because it was very easy to just say, 1689, copy-paste.

I did do some work, though, of course. I made it personal. And one of the criticisms I had on that was, you had no angelology. You never addressed angels. This is great textbook Protestant theology, but you never talked about an angel.

You never talked about angels. Angels are in the Bible.

It's like, yeah, you're right. That's interesting.

Interesting that I don't ever really consider that or think of that. My Christianity really has no use for angels or angelology. Well, it is, of course, all over the scriptures. I was reading one commentator this week who said this.

It's an ancient superstition. Common sense ought to prevail over mystical fantasy.

No.

Common sense is often stained by the prevailing winds of the day. Common sense is often stained by cultural assumptions, philosophical assumptions. Common sense is something that we produce to sort of shackle ourselves or move ourselves away from what God has revealed.

It's not that common sense reveals over what we declare to be too fantastical, too absurd.

No.

Biblical revelation ought to prevail over common sense. We're Christians. We believe in scripture, sola scriptura, right? So let's be very careful to not wave out of hand things that we deem too far-fetched.

That's not how we approach scripture. What God reveals is true. If it's true that he's revealed it and that's the case you have to make, then we simply submit and we say amen. Dwayne Garrett says, The ancient Hebrew would take this to mean that angelic beings somehow took on corporeal form, bodily form, as males and had sexual relations with women.

And this is how all of the ancient Jewish interpreters took it. This does not really contradict the teaching of Jesus that angels do not marry and thus are presumably without gender since clearly what the angels do here is illicit and represents an abandoning of their proper place.

We're going to circle back to that. Garrett says, I suspect the real reason modern people reject this interpretation is they simply find it too far-fetched and that's been my experience. Oh, that sounds ridiculous, says Calvin.

It does, but that's not an argument against it if that's what's being revealed. Now what is Garrett referencing? Because this is a very good counterpoint to the view. He's referencing Matthew 22. You remember the Sadducees are there to challenge Jesus.

The Sadducees, unlike the Pharisees, deny the resurrection, the bodily resurrection at the end. And so they're trying to present a hypothetical case that will stump Jesus. And their case is simply this.

There's a man who dies. And so, following Leveret Law, his brother goes in to his wife and provides for her, marries her. And then he dies. And so the next brother then goes in, marries the wife, and so on, all the way down the line they die.

Unfortunate family. But all these brothers die one after the other and this woman is now the widow to six. And then this is the challenge. At the resurrection, whose wife will she be? And what the Sadducees want the answer to be is,.

Oh, that's just ridiculous.

There must be no resurrection because we can't handle thinking like that. That was their gotcha hook. And Jesus says, basically, in very polite words, You're so ignorant. You don't know the scriptures.

You don't even know the power of God. Already he's taken them down a peg. And then he says this. At the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven.

Now we assume, therefore, angels do not marry. Perhaps angels cannot express sexuality. Angels are not even gendered. And we build that all on assumptions from Matthew 22.

But please notice,.

Jesus is talking about angels in heaven. In other words, he's talking about holy angels. And he's not talking about fallen angels in this context. He's talking about holy angels and what they do not do.

Holy angels do not marry. And we'll be like holy angels in that we won't be given in marriage or marry. He's not clarifying what angels are capable of doing. He's simply saying what holy angels do not do.

They do not marry. Holy angels do not marry. And we'll be like them. He does not say it's impossible for an angel to copulate, to reproduce, to desire sexuality, to somehow express that physically. He does not address any of that.

This point builds into what I think is the most convincing evidence for this view. The sons of God being fallen angels. Jude, this is probably the biggest point. Jude compares the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah with the sin of angels in a way that seems very similar in Genesis 6.

In fact, I think he's building on Genesis 6.

So this is what Jude writes, Jude 6.

Pay very close attention to this. And the angels, who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.

As Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh,.

They are set forth as an example.

Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Did you catch that?

Listen very carefully. The angels, who did not keep their proper domain, left their own abode, Sodom and Gomorrah, in a similar manner to these, giving themselves over to sexual immorality and going after strange flesh.

Now, every now and then, a little Greek grammar is tremendously helpful. It doesn't happen often, but here is one of those times and one of those places where the precision of Greek is tremendously insightful.

When we read in the translation in a similar manner to these, we have a pronoun. And that reflexive pronoun is saying,.

It's a comparative pronoun,.

It's saying, in a manner similar to these, and the question is, what's these? Whatever these is referring to is what we call the antecedent. Now, in English, we don't have a way of tracing the antecedent.

The context has to make it clear. These must be referenced to that. Is it referenced to the cities, referenced to the judgment? In English, we don't know. In Greek, it's precise enough that it has to be linked.

It has to agree what we say in gender and number. And here, it can only agree with angels. So that means we should read it this way. Because in the Greek, it's crystal clear. In a similar manner to these, these is representing angels.

The angels. That means we ought to read it this way. What Sodom and Gomorrah did in sexual immorality in going after strange flesh is similar in manner to the angels who left their own abode. In other words, Jude is saying that like the angels, the men of Sodom and Gomorrah gave themselves over to sexual immorality and went after strange flesh, and that was an abandoning of their proper place.

And so the fallen angels view, to my mind, is confirmed by Jude,.

And also 2 Peter,.

Which I'll mention in a moment. And both of them are reflecting awareness of 1 Enoch, which is a book we've already referenced,.

A book outside of the canon,.

But very influential, and certain parts were quoted. What we know of holy angels.

Is consistent with this view.

Angels can do physical things. Angels can assume physical human form. We're going to see that as we move forward in Genesis. Angels appear to Abraham, and they look like men. In fact, they sit down and eat with him in Genesis 18.

The angels who go to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sit with Lot,.

And they eat what Lot provides for them. And, surprisingly, the men of Sodom try to actually assault, sexually assault these angels in Genesis 19. It would hardly be a surprise that such demonically derived offspring would have supernatural strength, have supernatural wisdom and insight and engineering and domineering, and would have a physical ability to reign and exercise power.

Do you remember in the Gospels when Jesus comes to the Gadarene demoniac, and they could not bind him? He was living in a cave, naked, howling, and he was a terror to the countryside there. But they couldn't constrain him.

In fact, they'd try with chains, but he would break them. I remember seeing videos of cops. I vicariously experienced what Sergeant Brown maybe has to deal with in watching old cops episodes. And, you know, you'll see some drug addict, and they'll, of course, be in a run, and they'll have their hand in handcuffs,.

And they'll say,.

Officer, I'm going to break these handcuffs. I'm going to break these handcuffs. And the handcuffs never break. Now, they're hopped up. The drugs have given them strength, but not that kind of strength, not Clark Kent kind of strength.

Well, that's not so with the Gadarene demoniac. He breaks chains.

He breaks chains.

It's supernatural. It's supernatural. Very fascinating. This is a footnote. Very fascinating. That when Legion cries out, you know, have you come to judge us before the time, before the appointed time?

And they basically beg, you know, let us, let us, you know, don't cast us into the abyss. Don't cast us into the deep. And in Mark's gospel, when Jesus cast him into the swine, and the swine barrel off the cliff, and a lot of translations, I think the ESV gets it right.

A lot of translations say,.

And they fell into the sea.

It doesn't say sea.

It says abyss.

That's very significant. Very significant when we look at what Jude is trying to tell us. These demons that did not stay in their proper place, these fallen angels, they didn't stay in their proper place.

They desired something physical,.

Something corporeal.

They began to torment men.

And they're reserved in judgment. They're reserved in a deep and dark place under chains, under torment. And it seems to me that Legion knows that's where Jesus is going to send them. He's going to send them to the abyss.

To be reserved there.

Along with the fallen angels here from Genesis 6 until that day of judgment,.

Until that last day.

Derek Kidner says, the craving of demons for a body, which is evident in the gospels, offers at least some parallel to this lust for sexual experience. Just to reinforce this evidence, and this will be the last point we make on this, 2 Peter 2, verses 4 and following,.

We see the same dynamic.

Fallen angels, and then a reference to the flood, and then a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. So it's parallel with Jude, 2 Peter 2, 4 and 5. If God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people,.

A preacher of righteousness,.

And he goes on. So just notice again, angels are cast into chains of darkness, just like Jude, and it's in the sweep of the days of Noah. It's in the context of the flood, just like Jude, and then it goes on to Sodom.

In other words, he's hovering over the narrative of Genesis, speaking about angels.

So when we read that,.

We shouldn't think this is the initial fall of the angels at the beginning. We should think of this as the sin of leaving their abode in Genesis 6. Well, that's the view I'm leaning toward. And though it was the ancient view of the Jews and the earliest Christians, like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, by the fourth century, all the way till today, it hasn't been the dominant view.

I think now most scholars hold to it.

I'd say though still, the Sethide and mixed marriage view is the most dominant.

I was reading,.

This is an early church father, Theodore and Osiris. He said some mad fools hold the sons of God to be angels.

Well, there you go.

I'm a mad fool because I hold the sons of God to be angels.

But let's move on in chapter six.

Now that you're probably more confused than you realized you could be.

About that passage.

The chapter six is emphasizing anything. It's emphasizing the corruption of sinful humanity. In fact, we see a threefold description beginning with chapter six, verses five through seven. Then again in 11 through 13 and then again in verse 17.